TheVat

Go to Alpha Centauri, 4.25 light years away, at 99.9 percent the speed of light, the journey as observed by an observer on Earth would take a bit more than 4.25 years. On the ship, however, the travel time would be a little more than 60 days. The equivalence between time dilation and Lorentz contraction (linear, in the direction you are traveling) seems to throw people off. On the ship, one could easily imagine one had got to Centauri much faster than light, based on the subjective shipboard time and one's belief that the star is over 4 LY away. But really one has just contracted the intervening space wrt the ship.

Yup. Immune response, analgesia, inflammation, BP, resting heart rate, all respond to increased interaction with people recognized as sympathetic. You could be Paul Kurtz, James Randi, Richard Dawkins, and if a shaman walked into your hospital room and began shaking a gourd full of seeds over your body and chanting, some of your biomarkers would improve. For sure, they would improve more if you had a deep cultural belief in the shaman's methods and healing powers.

ChatGPT, is that you? Howdy!

If Ukraine hadn't signed the Budapest Memorandum they would have nukes and Putin would have been likely deterred from attacking. So, in terms of realpolitik, the baboon approach is valid. In terms of a moral analysis, we get Mack's tightrope problem. Disarming Ukraine in 1994 meant there was no risk it could bare its nuclear fangs and have Russia call its bluff. If they had kept nukes, there would be some risk. It's the risk-loving poker players who sometimes gain power in a country, or a rogue military officer who breaks loose from central command, that make the risk Mack addresses a real one.

I guess they are distinguishing between objective measures of safety and more subjective (clinging to nuclear teddy bears) political forms. Politics has a lot of threat gesturing. Like baboon troupes.

Gould and others offer arguments for phenotypic traits that are neutral. Spandrels are an example. (Gould coined the term, going from the spandrels of San Marco) The human chin. Genady's earlobes. (mine are unusually purposeful) Gould and Richard Lewontin teamed up to make a critique of adaptationism that's pretty persuasive imo.

I liked this. Baby steps away from the cliff. And this was sort of where START was headed. How that treaty can be restored I have no idea. I agree the US didn't really explore the philosophic questions early on the arms race, when asking them could have got us off on a different foot. But there was too much Red Menace hysteria, thanks to Sen. Joe McCarthy and others of his ilk.

However (and your point about the wee fellas I did see) if the Big 5 disarmed (which was the thought experiment I was running) and the UN banned nukes, then we and our allies would be part of the coalition having the ugly task of enforcing the ban. If, say, Pakistan and NK failed to start dismantling their nukes as the rest of the nuclear countries were doing, they would quickly find themselves very unsafe. If the Security Council ever came together on this, the little holdouts would become the turds in the punchbowl. You may say I'm a dreamer.... Someplace like here? https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/europe/russia-putin-empire-restoration-endgame-intl-cmd/index.html Or from one of hundreds of other news outlets that have covered Putin's public remarks directly referencing his plans to rebuild the Empire. x-post with @iNow

It is encouraging when someone grasps the essential lie that nuclear weapons make the world safer. Until we can forge some kind of international and binding treaty that reduces then eliminates nukes, no one is safe. Those of us who live near an AFB with a nuclear bomber wing, or GCHQ or a missile field don't so easily enjoy the luxury of imagining we are safe. Even a fairly limited Herman Khan scenario of nuclear war would make current spectres of climate catastrophe, polar melting, PFAS toxicity, plasticmageddon, lethal pandemics, etc look like a few ants at a picnic by comparison. The kids of Generation Z give me some hope because so many of them seem to grasp these realities and their sharing of awareness easily crosses the porous international borders of the web.

I would guess public opinion is strong enough in the US, so the present problem is Russia and China and their being 2/5 of the UN Security Council. If they ever (next blue moon, perhaps) decided to join US, UK, and France on a full disarmament of nukes, then we would probably be well on our way to a solution. An international ban, backed by the Big Five, could maybe be implemented. But only if there was rigorous international monitoring of all fissile materials. The toughest countries to disarm might prove to be ones like Pakistan, Israel, India, and of course you know who. Certain financial supports, especially for Israel, might have to be withdrawn to encourage compliance.

You need either need huge war power or huge economic power to enforce a no-nukes restriction. Ideally both. Another path, if there was a time when a more global coalition could really come together on no nukes, would be for nations to consider the budgeting joys of not maintaining a nuke arsenal. Such arsenals are hideously expensive. Samuel Beckett couldn't have come up with a scenario more absurd than hundreds of billions spent to maintain something you can never use. Conventional modern warfare is absurd enough. Nukes are absurdity cubed. Sell leaders on all the low carbon energy to be had from all that plutonium. More dystopian: A terrible global economic collapse that reduced all nations to poverty could do the job - no one could afford to keep the nuke thing going. Unfortunately such a collapse would likely also mean government incapacity to disassemble the warheads and safely process and secure all that plutonium, so you could have the terrorist nightmare of militant splinter groups raiding ICBM silos and the like.

Respectfully, I have to say that it will be efficacious to implement consensus mechanisms that build through multiple iterations of the feedback system as it cycles through each incremental through-line of various pedagogical tiers as they self-actualize and tesselate through a full plenum of profit algorithms and covariant fact valuations. And thanks for a good laugh!

Matt Davies is a master.

Goodness me, could this be industrial disease?

Well, he IS the Reaper, after all. 😀

Also 1E1*2E2*3E3. Also the sum of the mystery numbers on the American (cult popular) series "Lost." Also the product of the Supreme Court size and the most common jury size (9 and 12). Also, in Hinduism 108 is the sacred number of creation. Also sacred in Buddhism. In Islam it's the number associated with Allah. You get the idea. (there was also the frequent noticing of $1.08 in coins in my pocket, a digital clock happening to read 1:08, etc) Type "significance of 108" in a search engine and you will be drenched in mystical connections and mathematic elegance. It's an absolute turbocharger for association chaining.

Plus one - fascinating. The human mind is particularly adept at pattern recognition, useful for animal tracking or hunting for edible plants or seeing a potential enemy hiding in a bush, less useful when working overtime in a world full of symbol systems - letters, numbers, logos, etc. Many logical fallacies and statistical fallacies (and pareidolia) arise from such over-application of pattern recognition. (I often am reminded of one called The Texas Sharpshooter, which also seems common among crackpots) I have wondered if astrology buffs also have a tendency to association chaining - it's sort of a conspiracy theory involving celestial objects and Greek/Roman god names mystically applied to them, with spurious connections constantly being drawn and reinforced by very selective observations of persons. I wonder how rates of belief in astrology correlates with rates of Q-anon beliefs. On a personal note, I once let this cognitive tendency go a little overboard on the number 108. (I let it happen on purpose, curious what would happen) That number was everywhere. Once I even saw it lurking, big brass letters on the side of a house, behind an EVERGREEN tree.

This would be worth linking here. Who collected, how it was tested, what researchers it was shared with, where it is stored, etc. When an archaeologist finds axolotl remains in a stew pot in Aztec ruins, there's a chain of custody that may end up in a specimen drawer at a university or natural history museum. One can formally request to see them, examine them, in some cases subject them to NDT. (some institutions you have to ask only once, but some you have to axolotl...)

Hehe. It does seem possible that a craft would leave something, even if it doesn't empty its latrine tank or toss out candy wrappers.* Change to residual radiation levels, thermal stress to soil and plants, bits of an ablation shield if it entered atmosphere from orbit, tracks of some kind, traces of unusual chemical compounds if an airlock opened, unusual indentations in the ground, traces of biocide chems, if something was disinfected....I expect this list could go on at some length. (*Milky Way wrappers, perhaps)

BMTI. And I would object to overmuch parental input (blasphemy in some circles, I know) because I don't see most parents as expert on pedagogy or what branches of human knowledge are needed for well-rounded education, or what curricula are optimal for specific trajectories in life. I would like pedagogical experts doing this. Just as I'd send a family member to a cancer clinic that was organized and run by oncologists and healthcare admin pros, not a random group of relatives of cancer patients. America already has too many ignoramuses dictating how to run things they understand very little.

Well, with AI, it would likely have been immersed in human language from its very beginning stages, so maybe not analogous to a lion. But maybe it's not completely OT, in terms of the broader question of how an AI would experience the world differently from us. And much depends on whether or not an AI is embodied, either virtually or as an android. And if it has a childhood-like phase of growth. And other considerations.

Just asking this again (re the Minot case). This seems to me the missing leg on the evidence chair. Once in a while you see some poorly documented case where it's reported there was some physical artifact or trace and invariably it's reported to have gone missing or been swiped by shadowy characters. In wildlife biology, if you want to estimate how many cougars are in a certain area, you don't rely on sightings (cougars tend to hide from humans). You lay down a grid, and get a team to each walk through their square and hopefully find cougar scat, and make an estimate based on the amounts of scat. * * yes, you really have to know your shit

That study also underscores the way the placebo effect gets at subconscious processes in the brain, so that even someone told it's a sugar pill and we presume will no longer consciously believe in the treatment effectiveness, still shows a benefit. That is how powerful suggestion can be, bypassing our rational mind.

IIRC Wittgenstein's famous lion quote was in German and may have suffered in the translation. He wasn't saying that we couldn't follow some of what the lion might say. Rather he was saying that, being a lion, some of the referents in a sentence might be subtly different for certain words so that we wouldn't understand the nuances as well. The lion might say, I would like to have your family for dinner sometime, e.g. We would understand the words, while still misunderstanding the underlying meaning. Because the lion and we experience the world somewhat differently - and have a different concept of having someone for dinner. ETA: What Ludwig meant IMO is that, if a lion could talk as we talk and mean what we mean, then he would have ceased to be a lion and have become a person. And yes, a bit OT.

Yes, I don't see philosophers like John Searle or David Chalmers getting invited to the party celebrating conscious machines. In popular thinking, some form of Turing Test is enough. The thinkers who argue about qualia (the subjective "felt" aspect of mind) will probably still argue whether it's simulated or genuine for a long time. David Chalmers' "philosophic zombie" is an amusing approach to the question. Personally, I think the best evidence of real consciousness will be the AI having difficult growth periods in its life - like a child.